THE SPLENDID BOHEMIANS PRESENT: THE SUNNY SIDE OF MY STREET with THE "MIGHTY MEZ" - SONGS TO MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD - EPISODE #41: THE HUT-SUT SONG (A Swedish Serenade) (Merrie Melodies, 1942 / Freddy Martin, RCA, 1941)

DIG THIS WITH BILL MESNIK AND RICH BUCKLAND- THE SPLENDID BOHEMIANS

Call it “dream logic”; call it a time-collapsing mind meld. It came to me in a dream: a snatch of nonsense lyric and melody, an ear-worm summoned up from 60 years in the past. I didn’t know what it was, why it was teasing me, or precisely where it came from, but there it was… “and, so on, so on, so forth…” What was it?

I googled just that much, and up it came: “The Hut-Song,” sung by the eponymous elephant in Horton Hatches an Egg, a cartoon that I had watched as a toddler. And, digging back a bit further, I discovered that preceding that animated Dr. Suess adaptation, The Hut-Sut Song was a monster pop hit, with several cover versions - the most popular being Freddy Martin’s. Thereby, not only did I jump start my memory, but I made a new discovery, as well. So, here we are: A Sunny Song from the deep recesses of my sub-conscious. I’m including both versions because the pop hit has a whole backstory to explain the indecipherable lyrics.

I think the genesis of this whole mission was that I recently became a grandfather, and had been thinking about what books I’d like to read to the child. I was trying to remember the ones I read to my kids, and the ones that were read to me. I loved all the Dr. Suess books, especially “If I Ran the Circus”, and later, cogitating about what to include in the next round of Sunny Songs, this ditty bubbled up from deep within my gooey grey matter, and would not be denied.

So, my next question would be: Why was Horton the Elephant singing that song? It’s a house of mirrors.